I speak from the perspective of an architect working on large commercial projects across different building typologies, and therefore do not use the MEP aspects, which may be better than I have experienced here. Its function is to build a 3D “BIM” model of a building and lay out 2D documentation in the traditional form of drawing sheets. Revit is a proprietary software developed by the monopoly Autodesk for the AEC industry. Join the OSArch community today and help drive community-driven AEC tools. It is under heavy development, but all early adopters are welcome. We are now developing a 100% free and open-source native OpenBIM authoring tool called BlenderBIM. Black-box BIM data is no longer acceptable by companies with a large real-estate portfolio. Data about our built environment is a human right and should be transparent and not governed by a vendor. Update: The popularity of this article has shown the industry needs to break out of the unethical behaviour by proprietary vendors, which result in proprietary incompatibility, proprietary obsolescence, and proprietary subscription. I would play down the title to something more politically correct, but that would risk understating Revit’s limitations that I have to deal with on an almost daily basis.
